Fairy tales for grown -ups: Diane Arbus's social panorama.
Item
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Title
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Fairy tales for grown -ups: Diane Arbus's social panorama.
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Identifier
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AAI3169917
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identifier
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3169917
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Creator
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Gross, Frederick.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Geoffrey Batchen
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History
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Abstract
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Disenchanted with the universalist vision of humanity proposed by Edward Steichen's widely popular The Family of Man exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, photographers like Robert Frank and Diane Arbus immediately sought a more jarring, ironic, critical portrayal of Americans. Working within, yet against, the genres of photojournalism and portraiture, Frank and Arbus sought to disrupt the photograph's use as an illustration of a specific ideological discourse which they felt was uncritically aligned to American Cold-War propaganda widely disseminated in popular periodicals such as Life and Look.;This study of the photographs of Diane Arbus argues that, viewed retrospectively, her work may be seen as a panorama of portraits in dialogue with, yet ultimately subverting, the normative typological readings of individuals characteristic of historical portrait collections by well-known photographers beginning with Mathew Brady and running through August Sander. Through her emphasis on "the flaw we all possess," what was at stake for Arbus was no less than the humanist repositioning of the individual as representation in photographic portraiture, challenging the viewer's comfortable, familiar positivist readings of human physiognomy according to culturally-coded typologies.;Arbus clearly problematized the social division between the American white middle-class and the Other in the sixties. Her social critique played itself out in a most familiar terrain, magazines, alongside advertisements for luxury items, haute couture, short literary works by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, and Civil Rights-themed essays by writers like Bynum Shaw and James Baldwin.;Arbus's panorama is mapped here in relation to the social climate in which it was produced. The modalities of pastiche, the body, identity, and madness are each examined and considered in a relation to particular photographic images and texts of the 1960s. Her work is historicized as an artistic practice with parallels to similar thematic concerns in Pop art, Performance art, and contemporary literature.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
